Tainted Saints

…According to a labor source familiar with the talks, the agreement calls for a 40 percent tax surtax on policies that cost more than $24,000 for family coverage and $8,900 for individuals, a slight increase over the levels in a bill approved by the Senate on Christmas Eve. Dental and vision benefits would be exempt, and the threshold for taxation would be raised by at least $3,000 in high-cost states, for high-cost professions and for workers whose policies cost more because of their age or their gender…

[Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results...-Ed.]

BILL MOYERS: Something’s not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you’re about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that’s just dandy with the White House.

Truth is, our capitol’s being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that’s pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It’s capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market. 

Here to talk about all this are two journalists who don’t pull their punches. Robert Kuttner is an economist who helped create and now co-edits the progressive magazine THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, and the author of the book OBAMA’S CHALLENGE, among others. 

Also with me is Matt Taibbi, who covers politics for ROLLING STONE magazine where he is a contributing editor. He’s made a name for himself writing in a no-holds-barred, often profane, but always informative and stimulating style that gets under the skin of the powerful. His most recent article is “Obama’s Big Sellout,” about the President’s team of economic advisers and their Wall Street connections. It’s been burning up the blogosphere. Welcome to both of you. 

BILL MOYERS: Let’s start with some news. Some of the big insurance companies, Well Point, Cigna, United Health, all surged to a 52 week high in their share prices this week when it was clear there’d be no public option in the health care bill going through Congress right now. What does that tell you, Matt?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, I think what most people should take away from this is that the massive subsidies for health insurance companies have been preserved while it’s also expanded their customer base because there’s an individual mandate in the bill that’s going to provide all these companies with the, you know, 25 or 30 million new people who are going to be paying for health insurance. So, it’s, obviously, a huge boon to that industry. And I think Wall Street correctly read what the health care effort is all about. 

ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President’s Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton’s Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel’s take away from Bill Clinton’s failure to get health insurance passed was ‘don’t get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.’ So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we’re not going to attack your customer base, we’re going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it’s not surprising that this is what comes out the other side. 

BILL MOYERS: So are you saying that this, what some call a sweetheart deal between the pharmaceutical industry and the White House, done many months ago before this fight really began, was because the drug company money in the Democratic Party?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, it’s two things. Part of it was we need to do whatever it takes to get a bill. Never mind whether it’s a really good bill, let’s get a bill passed so we can claim that we solved health insurance. Secondly, let’s get the drug industry and the insurance industry either supporting us or not actively opposing us. So that there was some skirmishing around the details, but the deal going in was that the administration, drug companies, insurance companies are on the same team. Now, that’s one way to get legislation, it’s not a way to transform the health system. Once the White House made this deal with the insurance companies, the public option was never going to be anything more than a fig leaf. And over the summer and the fall, it got whittled down, whittled down, whittled down to almost nothing and now it’s really nothing. 

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this was Howard Dean’s point this week was that this individual mandate that’s going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it’s going to be extremely unpopular and it’s going to be theirs for a generation. It’s going to be an albatross around the neck of this party. [more...]

COPENHAGEN — Leaders here concluded a climate change deal on Friday that the Obama administration called “meaningful” but that falls short of even the modest expectations for the summit meeting here.

The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle, but the answers are bound to leave many of the participants unhappy.

Even an Obama administration official conceded, “It is not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change, but it’s an important first step.”

“No country is entirely satisfied with each element,” the administration statement said, “but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress.”

The accord drops the expected goal of concluding a binding international treaty by the end of 2010, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiation before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form.

“We entered this negotiation at a time when there were significant differences between countries,” the American official said.

“Developed and developing countries have now agreed to listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines.”

The deal came after a dramatic moment in which Mr. Obama burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Chinese protocol officers protested, and Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret. The intrusion led to new talks that cemented key terms of the deal, American officials said. [more...]

No deal. Not even a fig leaf.

That seemed to be the implication of President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech at the Copenhagen climate summit.

He arrived at the Bella Center at 9:30 in the morning and immediately huddled in a non-scheduled and tense meeting with 18 other world leaders, including Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei. As Obama and the others talked, White House officials told reporters that Obama had ripped up his schedule for the day–supposedly the last day of the conference–and was attempting to rescue the troubled negotiations. He apparently did not succeed.

After the meeting ended, the summit began its most high-profile session. Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen opened the gathering, saying that it is “not too often us leaders get a chance to chart out a new course for our planet.” No such course was forthcoming. Minutes later, Chinese Premier Wen Jibao hailed his own nation’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But he offered no give on the key matters that had been raised by the United States: China placing its emissions reductions within a binding treaty and subjecting them to outside verification. Wen indicated that China would keep its emissions limits voluntary and unilateral. Next Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva said it would take a “miracle” to reach an accord at Copenhagen. He complained that due to the lack of progress in the negotiations he had been forced to participate in a 2:00 am meeting with other world leaders. He declared that “each country has to have the confidence to do its own oversight”–seemingly siding with China on this front.

Then it was Obama’s turn. His eight-minutes of remarks signaled a global train wreck. Not hiding his anger and frustration, he said, “I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt.” He maintained that his administration has started to mount an “ambitious” plan to cut emissions. And he contended that it is “in our mutual interest to achieve a global accord in which we agree to steps, and to hold each other accountable for certain commitments.” According to his prepared text, Obama was next supposed to say, “I believe that the pieces of that accord are nowclear.” (Emphasis added.)Instead, he asserted, “I believe that the pieces of that accord should now be clear.” That is, there was no consensus among the major global leaders regarding what a deal would look like–not even one that would paper over the deep differences that have plagued the Copenhagen summit from the start: what targets to set; how to include both developed and developing countries within the same framework; what financing would be available for international programs to help poorer nations contend with climate change. [more...]

WASHINGTON — Progressive radio’s most popular talker seems a little fed up with President Obama after this week’s health care concessions.

“Right now, Mr. President,” declared Ed Schultz on his 6 pm MSNBC show, “Your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout, a corporate sellout, out that. I know it’s tough audio, but I’m your buddy Ed. I’ve got to tell you this. I don’t think anybody else is.”

Schultz’s words echo the flurry of liberal criticisms aimed at Obama and the Democratic leadership this week, following their jettisoning of the popular public option and the Medicare buy-in provision for those 55 and up from the legislation.

“You aren’t listening to the very people who put you in office, Mr. President,” Schultz, who is typically a vigorous supporter of Obama, continued. “This isn’t about your legacy. It’s about the people in America who need health care now.”

The current bill is projected to cover roughly an additional 30 million Americans, largely through federal subsidies and mandates that individuals purchase insurance. Progressives argue that without an expansion of government-run options, the legislation fails to fix the core problems in the system.

Schultz also reflected the sentiment put forth by Arianna Huffington and other progressives — that this bill is effectively a bailout for insurance companies.

“Mr. President, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not,” he said, “but you have carved out the most important elements of reform. The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry. They get a bunch of new customers.”

“The base is restless,” Schultz continued. “They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. They are looking for your GPS coordinates.”

Schultz has in recent days voiced concerns as to whether the current bill is worth passing. “So much for change we can believe in,” he said.

Despite the widespread criticism of the bill, there are numerous respected progressive writers — including Paul Krugman of the New York Times — urging its passage despite the flaws, arguing that failure would be much worse.

Danny Glover, Jesse Jackson, and other activists talk to Lloyd Grove about disappointment in the African-American community with the president’s first year.

Danny Glover heaved a sigh when I asked him recently what he thought of President Obama’s performance so far.

It wasn’t a sigh of relief.

“I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don’t see anything different,” the activist movie actor said of Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. “On the domestic side, look here: What’s so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street?”

More in sorrow than in anger, Glover went on: “What choice does he have—in four years, eight years? Let’s just call a spade a spade. Really. There are no choices out there. He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black—and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman—but what choices do they have within the structure?”

Glover is among a growing chorus of African-American opinion leaders who are publicly and privately expressing varying degrees of resignation, disappointment, and outright anger concerning a presidency on which so many hopes have ridden. Who can forget the iconic image of the tear-streaked Rev. Jesse Jackson—who in 1984 and 1988 waged formidable campaigns of his own for the Democratic presidential nomination—as he stood overcome with emotion amid the jubilant crowd at Chicago’s Grant Park as Obama gave his victory speech?

These days Jackson is decidedly dry-eyed. [more...]

The news in the last few days has continued the drumbeat of demoralizing events which started in the Bush administration, and with only a few hiccups has continued through the Obama administration. It is clear that Obama is, fundamentally, Bush’s 3rd term.

First we have the health care “reform” debacle, where it has been confirmed that the White House pushed Harry Reid to accept Lieberman’s ultimatum, not go to reconciliation. There will be no public option in the Senate bill. There will be no Medicare expansion. There will be no cap on yearly limits. What there will be is a mandate forcing people to buy insurance, some subsidies which can still leave people spending money they can’t afford, and guaranteed issue of lousy plans (Plans where only 70% of the premiums have to be spent on care, for example.) Unless progressive Senators are willing to filibuster, or House progressives are willing to vote against en-masse, something very close to the Senate plan is what will pass, because as I noted some time ago, the White House’s bottom line is that something, anything must pass, and conservative Dems are willing to kill the bill to make sure it doesn’t actually threaten health industry profits in any way, shape, or form. (Thus why drug importation, which would cost Pharma money, will be made illegal.)

All of this was completely predictable. Furthermore the weakness of progressive and liberal legislators, is largely to blame:

Obama and the Democratic leadership’s bottom line is they must pass some bill called “health care reform”. Unless you threaten to take away their bottom line, they will take away anything that isn’t progressives bottom line

This is Negotiation 101, and progressive legislators either don’t understand it, or are spineless. As a result they, and Americans, have been rolled yet again. What is depressing about this is that it should be a surprise to no one, but apparently has surprised many.

It is also noteworthy that spending billions on turning brown people into a fine red mist (a.k.a. the Afghan war) is acceptable, but health care (a.k.a. saving actual American lives) is something which can’t cost money. What an interesting–and clearly evil–set of priorities that reveals. I guarantee that real healthcare reform would save more American lives than the entire war on terror—assuming said “war” hasn’t cost more American lives than it’s saved, which is almost certainly the case.

Next we have what Glenn Greenwald is calling the creation of Gitmo North, in which people whom the government judges there is not enough evidence to convict, will be held indefinitely without trial. This is the very definition of tyranny. Any nation which does this is a nation of men, not laws. America has forsaken its fundamental premise and proved its degradation. Yes, this started under Bush, but as Obama embraces this, it because a bipartisan project and the new elite consensus. This is now something which has been confirmed as US policy which is extremely unlikely to change no matter who is in power.

Then we have bankers are giving themselves bonuses larger than the entire economy’s GDP growth this year. [more...]

It sounded like a throwaway line in President Obama’s West Point address about the Afghanistan war. “It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak,” the president said, tying his troop increase in Afghanistan to direct threats to U.S. national security. “In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror.”

That was all Obama said about the relationship between al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas and potential domestic terror attacks. But at a Congressional hearing shortly afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cited those same recent arrests in the United States to argue for the wisdom of the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The extremist “syndicate” headed by al-Qaeda and located in the Waziristan region of Pakistan has an “unmatched” capability to export terrorist activities to “Yemen, Somalia, or, indeed, Denver.” That was a reference to Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year old Afghan-American whom authorities charged in September for conspiring with members of al-Qaeda to pull off a terrorist attack.

Zazi’s case is part of a recent and rapid upswing of announced arrests of American Muslims suspected of involvement with extremism, including in Chicago and Minneapolis, where young Muslims have been accused of aiding anti-Indian terror groups and al-Qaeda-linked Somali militants. Dramatically, last week, Pakistani authorities arrested five young Virginians whom they claim were seeking to liaise with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. Those arrests prompted stories this weekend in The Washington Post and The New York Times asking whether American Muslims’ resistance to extremism has frayed in recent years.

 But current and former counterterrorism officials and al-Qaeda experts warn that while the Pakistani tribal areas represent the center of international Islamic terrorist extremism, its connections to recent domestic terror threats are more ambiguous than the administration has recently portrayed. And they add that the recent arrests indicate a silver lining: intelligence and law enforcement are increasingly equipped to intercept domestic terror threats, particularly if they have some tie to al-Qaeda in Pakistan, raising questions about how potent a threat al-Qaeda remains.

Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials who have testified before Congress this year, is under significant threat in the Pakistani tribal areas. Pakistan’s Army has reinvaded those areas and forcibly confronted its allies in the Pakistani Taliban, constricting al-Qaeda’s freedom of action. The CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command have harassed al-Qaeda and its allies for the past two years, primarily through missiles fired from unmanned aerial vehicles. Most recently, a strike Tuesday may have killed al-Qaeda’s chief liaison to its affiliate in Yemen.

If so, the targeting will have highlighted a revealing fact about al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11: boxed into the tribal areas, the organization seeks less to pull off major terrorist attacks than to inspire and in some cases fund them. It has inspired a multiplicity of extremist websites, allowing people worldwide — including in the U.S. — access to its propaganda. And it also seeks to establish a presence in Muslim countries like Yemen and Somalia, often by offering financial or training support to existing extremist groups outside Pakistan. While those two approaches offer al-Qaeda a continued lease on life, analysts say they also dilute al-Qaeda’s brand and raise questions about the actual degree of danger it still poses. [more...]

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash — easily — was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.  From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP – will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage.  Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional “centrists.”  Right.  The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.   And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so: 

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

[more...]

[Seriously, WHICH big sellout? There are so many to choose from...-Ed.]

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is? [more...]